Tag Archives: Brony

Weird things happen when you watch YouTube’s recommended videos. And I blame Weird Al. Back when I used to play World of Warcraft I found this WoW video animation of his ‘Hardware Store’ song. (If you’re unaware of this ditty, go look it up on YouTube: it’s worth it just for the verbal gymnastics.) Recently, for whatever reason, the YouTube algorithm threw me a different Hardware Store animation, built out of clips for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Now, I’m old enough to remember when the MLP franchise started and it was very girly, but the clips made it look amusing and buck it if Netflix don’t have the first five seasons on stream…

So, I ended up binge-watching six seasons of MLP:FIM (I found the sixth to stream on Amazon), and four Equestria Girls films, and I’ve been smirking at the fandom-produced stuff on YouTube, DeviantArt, and a fanfic site… I’d hang my head in shame, but bronies are supposed to stand up proud. Whatever, I’m hooked. For a while anyway.

Now, the reason for this admission is that all this uplifting pony stuff percolating through my somewhat aberrant brain provoked an idea. The idea became a plot. The plot has become a book. I think I posted something saying I had a weird idea and I wasn’t sure it would work. Well, this is it and it’ll be out sometime next week. For those worried I’ve gone totally off the rails, there will be no ponies (in fact, the world in question doesn’t have any equines due to divergent evolution), but it does have dragons. A lot of dragons, though they aren’t exactly big scaled lizards most of the time… I should just let you read about it.

The new book is called Misfit Magic. It’s fantasy, obviously, set in a world with a weird mix of technologies and a fair bit of magic. It’s more traditional fantasy than urban fantasy, and I have no idea what categories I’m going to stuff it into for retail purposes, but Teen Fiction will not be one of them. And I have a cover which is quite bright for once…

Oh, yeah, and it’s set in a girls’ school for magic. Oh… I have to write cover blurb for this… What was I thinking?!

Anyway, I’m looking at releasing this on the 5th or 6th of May, depending upon when I can get through the final edits, and when I can come up with a reasonable cover blurb. And I repeat: no ponies.